Brooklyn Museum, Newly Refurbished, Seeks an Audience

By RANDY KENNEDY and CAROL VOGEL

Published: April 12, 2004

When the Brooklyn Museum was planning its Beaux-Arts palace alongside Prospect Park in 1894, an optimistic newspaper reporter wrote that the institution was ''destined to reach a lusty maturity and, without doubt, an evergreen old age.''

For many years it lived up to that promise, becoming a renowned museum with one of the world's finest collections of Egyptian art.

Planned for an independent city that was absorbed into New York shortly after the museum opened in 1897, the Brooklyn Museum watched its fortunes suffer with those of its borough. Budgets dwindled along with attendance. By the 1990's, attendance had dropped to 200,000 a year.

Now the museum, led by its director, Arnold L. Lehman, is changing course. It has all but abandoned efforts to lure visitors from Manhattan and is now, with the help of an image consultant, concentrating almost exclusively on its own backyard -- the 2.5 million residents of Brooklyn.

On Saturday and Sunday the museum will reach a watershed moment in its reinvention, unveiling a $63 million face-lift and modernization. There will be a futuristic glass entrance with fountains designed by the same company that created the ones at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and a new subway stop. In front of the entrance, there will be a public plaza, an attempt to remake the museum into the popular borough meeting place and social scene it once was. Inside, its biggest exhibition, ''Open House: Working in Brooklyn,'' will be devoted to 300 works by 200 Brooklyn artists.

But Mr. Lehman's efforts to concentrate on Brooklyn have raised concerns among many in the museum world, including some who work for him, that by trying to appeal to the broadest spectrum of visitors -- and to more than triple the museum's attendance over the next decade -- the museum will become a palace of popular culture rather than a place to see art.

There are fears that its curatorial staff and its world-class collection are being underused in favor of more shows like ''Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage'' in 2000, or ''Star Wars,'' a 2002 show of costumes and drawings from the movies, both of which packed in viewers but were derided by critics as little more than memorabilia.

The changes are not limited to the facade. The museum is redesigning many galleries, and many of the rooms have plump armchairs, computer touch screens, background music and flat-panel televisions showing short documentaries.

The museum has again redesigned its logo, announcing a return to its longtime name, the Brooklyn Museum, instead of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, adopted in 1997.

Relying on marketing experts, who conducted thousands of hours worth of interviews with city residents over the last year, the museum says its effort is meant to capitalize on what it has found to be its chief strength: that it is considered one of the city's most welcoming museums. The image consultants have gone so far as to hold what they call ''greeter training'' for everyone from security guards to curators.

Critics worry that the museum's officials are taking the theme of accessibility so far that they are undermining the museum's strengths as a place respected for its scholarship, its research library and its school outreach programs. For example, curators have recently been instructed to write explanatory labels in short, simple paragraphs that some curators describe as being designed for no more than a third-grade reading level.

Robert T. Buck, Mr. Lehman's predecessor, said he found the new direction disappointing but perhaps also inevitable. ''That's the changing nature of the museum world,'' he said. ''Lots of people, including me, deplore it. We believe in art for art's sake, in art first. But these days, it's all about promotion, the gate.''

Of Mr. Lehman, he said: ''He's not alone. He needs to survive.''

In a recent interview, Mr. Lehman characterized such criticism as the kind of knee-jerk reaction from museum traditionalists and elitists that has kept the Brooklyn Museum in limbo for decades.

The sleek new entrance, he argued, is far from simply cosmetic. And the extensive changes are questioned only by people who want to keep the museum as a kind of private, half-empty redoubt for themselves and their friends.

''The purpose is to open the museum up to this community,'' Mr. Lehman said, ''to position ourselves as a civic place in Brooklyn, civic in both senses of the word, as a meeting place and a place that represents everyone.''

He added, ''If that's not significant to critics, you know -- and you can quote me -- I don't care.''

The museum is not alone in recent years in putting out a populist welcome mat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had its Fabergé exhibition, the Guggenheim its motorcycles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is hoping to attract nonmuseumgoers with its forthcoming show of cars collected by Ralph Lauren. But none of these museums have sought mass appeal as thoroughly as the Brooklyn Museum.

After Mr. Lehman's problems during the wildly popular 1999 ''Sensation'' show -- he suffered attacks from Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani among others and was found to have lied about the show's genesis -- several board members have said that he has regained support from the trustees as he tries to reinvigorate the museum.